14 Replies - 7875 Views - Last Post: 26 November 2011 - 11:52 AM

Low physical memory

Posted 25 November 2011 - 12:44 PM

Guys, I'm running a Win7 pc with Intel E7500 2.93GHz and 1024MB memory..
From last two days am getting slow processing speed, and today when I checked the memory utilization in taskmanager its more than 60% of memory is utilized even at idle state.
Is that normal or some problem is there in system?
I have attached this screenshot of taskmngr.
Thanks!

Replies To: Low physical memory

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 25 November 2011 - 01:15 PM

It's not unusual for Windows to occupy that much even when idle. Even on my laptop, which has 6GiB, it tends to be at 40% - 60%. It's just Windows keeping stuff in memory in case you need it. Why waste time loading stuff into memory later when you can just have it preloaded, right?

With such a relatively low amount of RAM though, some performance issues are to be expected. It's the absolute minimum Microsoft recommends for the 32bit versions of Windows 7, and lower than the 2GB minimum it recommends for the 64 bit versions. (Your CPU supports 64 bit, so which version are you using?)

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 25 November 2011 - 01:16 PM

Well Windows 7 minimum requirements are 1 GB of memory so you are running with the minimum and yeah it takes a lot of memory to run windows. Honestly I always recommend that people run Windows 7 on at least double that or 2GB. But with the price of RAM these days, I would invest in a full 4GB. It is often the best bang for your buck you can get.

If you double your RAM there you should see a good performance increase during big processing load times.

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 25 November 2011 - 02:49 PM

It's hard to guess about the CPU performance. There could be a lot of things affecting that. Did anything change around the time this started? New drivers? New software? New hardware? Power failures? Anything?

Do you have a good anti-virus app? Any chance that a virus could be messing with things?

happyyesh, on 25 November 2011 - 08:43 PM, said:

But after making it double also i'll get 60% of free memory if we consider the current situation.

Not really. The memory management in modern OSs is very dynamic. It doesn't just load some X many MBs and then leave the rest empty. It will try to use the RAM. - If there is room it may load non-essential parts of the OS that it would otherwise ignore until needed, and even preload other frequently used applications in order to be able to start them faster once you open them.

The percentage of Physical Memory displayed in the Task Manager is also a poor indication of how much memory is actually available. Windows (and other modern OSs) use Virtual Memory to manage the memory of applications, allowing the running applications to use more than the Physical Memory installed on the system by moving the excess memory to the hard drive (the swap). - The total available Virtual Memory is the sum of the Physical Memory and the swap, which is usually some total of 2x the installed RAM. (Although that is configurable.)

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 25 November 2011 - 03:01 PM

Do listen to what Atli is telling you here. The idea that you have limited memory and that it is not readily available means that your CPU is going to have to do things like take more processing power to load in data. Instead of having everything ready in RAM for the picking it is going to be constantly swapping out data from hard disk to RAM.

So as it swaps data around and such, you are using more processor cycles to do things.

However, do keep in mind that you will see the CPU spike to 100% often. Doesn't mean anything is wrong. When you give it a task it is going to try to throw 100% of itself at the task. It should then immediately step back down. the only thing you don't want to see is that your CPU is pegged out at 100% for more than just a few seconds. This means the CPU is really having to work on a certain task and probably won't have much time to service other requests.

I am not seeing any problems here and everything you are describing is accurate given the limited amount of memory you apparently have.

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 25 November 2011 - 03:48 PM

I've never particularly been a fan of the way windows allocates memory. It's inefficient and hard to properly manage any of its preloaded programs.

If you don't have any particular reason why you must use windows, I would almost consider looking into Linux. The memory usage is far far better, and while W7 has made substantial strides from Vista, it still wastes a lot. Heck, if I can get a 256mB ram machine to function seamlessly inside of a Linux box.... well I'd hate to see you even try that with XP.

What's more on Linux: You can partition your ram for tasks and clear it out of any and all temps. Say you want a full gB for something, if you have enough not in virtual you can partition it to a process.

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 26 November 2011 - 01:44 AM

Atli, on 25 November 2011 - 02:49 PM, said:

It's hard to guess about the CPU performance. There could be a lot of things affecting that. Did anything change around the time this started? New drivers? New software? New hardware? Power failures? Anything?

Ya Atli bro, I think you're right cause 3 days back it faced some Fluctuations in power supply and it got restared 5-6 times. Could this be the root of problems?
And yes I've good antivirus and there was no such virus messsage that could be the reason to this happening.

Lemur bro I really appreciate what you're saying but I think every OS has their own different charaterstics and feature and I'm very well attached to the windows features although I've also used some versions of Linus too, but I don't think it could satisfy me!!

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 26 November 2011 - 02:37 AM

If the laptop is old enough (5+ years) I've seen them go out from just that on occasion. Constant high level usage could very well cause some issues. With laptops it's almost cheaper to buy a new one than to spend ~100 on repairs and hope that does to job.

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 26 November 2011 - 03:22 AM

If it's not a laptop then you may have an issue with your power supply. Live boot an Ubuntu CD, run GParted and check for disk errors, that could save you some significant issues later if you find them and backup now.

I would definitely take it into a shop and have the PS tested, because if that blows it could take the motherboard and everything else with it if it's bad enough.

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 26 November 2011 - 09:58 AM

Make sure the UPS has a good rating, sometimes those or power strips can still allow a strong enough surge to break through.

If it's not that though, just get another stick of RAM (or two if you already have a dual chip in) and make SURE you get the right type. With DDR3 out, it's way too tempting to jump a cheap 2-4 gB chip (then again that brings up 64 bit issues with over 4gB of ram anyways.)

Re: Low physical memory

Posted 26 November 2011 - 11:52 AM

RAM is about the only thing you could do at this point if it's not something else. All the processes are normal that I see on there, you could check msconfig and see if you find anything in startup, but that's about it.